Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Haskell represents both a language and a user community - and moreover a fantastic community full of friends, fun, and deep technical debate. Unfortunately, in recent times the community has started to fracture, e.g. Cabal vs Stack, haskell.org vs haskell-lang.org. These divisions have risen above technical disagreements and at some points turned personal. The solution, shepherded by Simon Peyton Jones, and agreed to by both members of the haskell.org committee and the maintainers of haskell-lang.org, is to form the Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG). The charter of the group is at the bottom of this post.

The goal of the Haskell Website Working Group is to make sure the Haskell website caters to the needs of Haskell programmers, particularly beginners. In doing so we hope to either combine or differentiate haskell.org and haskell-lang.org, and give people clear recommendations of what "downloading Haskell" means. Concretely, we hope that either haskell-lang.org redirects to haskell.org, or that haskell-lang.org ends up being used for something very different from today.

The Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG)

Scope and goals

The HWWG is responsible for the design and content of the user-facing haskell.org web site, including tutorials, videos, news, resource, downloads, etc.

The HWWG is not responsible for:

The infrastructure of haskell.org

Toolchains, Hackage, compilers, etc

The HWWG focuses on serving users of Haskell, not suppliers of technology or libraries.

An explicit goal is to re-unite the haskell.org and haskell-lang.org web sites.

Expected mode of operation

HWWG is not responsible for actually doing everything! The web site is on github. Anyone can make a pull request. The general expectation is that uncontroversial changes will be accepted and committed without much debate.

If there is disagreement about a proposed change, it's up to the HWWG to engage in (open) debate, and to seek input as widely as time allows, but finally to make a decision.

Membership

Initial membership comprises of:

Neil Mitchell (chair)

Nicolas Wu

Andrew Cowie

Vincent Hanquez

Ryan Trinkle

Chris Done

It is expected the committee will change over time, but the mechanism has not yet been thought about.

Rules of engagement

Recognising that honestly-held judgements may differ, we will be scrupulously polite both in public and in private.

Recognising that Haskell has many users, and that different users have different needs and tastes, we want haskell.org to be inclusive rather than exclusive, providing a variety of alternative resources (toolchains, tutorials, books, etc) clearly signposted with their intended audiences.

Ultimately the haskell.org committee owns the haskell.org URL, but it delegates authority for the design and content of the web site to the HWWG. In extremis, if the haskell.org committee believes that the HWWG is mismanaging the web site, it can revoke that delegation.